DSTNCMP²⁴ – data:room

ON MAY 24, 2024, BY WOLFGANG WEILER

Data Mining in the Spinning Mill

On Friday morning, most of the participants in the DSTNCMP²⁴ set off for home, well-rested after the gala night. But for about 50 curious minds, the DSTNCMP²⁴ continued on Friday morning in Dornbirn— at CampusVäre, the local Creative Institut Vorarlberg.

In the vast factory halls of a former weaving and spinning mill, Urs Treuthardt presented the data:room, which he founded—a creative space where data from various sources and perspectives is analyzed in an interdisciplinary manner to address current issues.

In the data:room, the major challenge posed by today's vast amounts of data could be overcome: Instead of burying them in dashboards, they could be placed in the "right" context and interpreted accurately.

Urs Treuthardt, the founder of the "matchmaking agency" Occursus and former managing director of Bodensee-Vorarlberg Tourism, explained to the participants how he envisions data-driven decision-making models in practice:

Before we think about data, we need to be clear on the key questions.

3 KEY FACTORS FOR SUCCESS: SPACE, DATA, AND MEDIATION

In the old industrial hall, meeting spaces can be reconfigured and designed in any way using scaffolding and flexible elements. Relevant data is sourced and fed into the data hub. The information is conveyed through human interpretation from various professional perspectives. The data:room thus enables “better understanding, better decision-making, and better execution.”

Inspiration Ulla Heher presented the Future Health Lab as an example of the three-step approach that has already shown some success. It is an innovation center dedicated to addressing challenges in Austria’s public health system. The goal is to bridge differing perspectives and create solutions that can positively impact the healthcare system and people’s lives.

NO BUSINESS CASE YET FORTHE DATA:ROOM

The data:room, founded in 2022, still has its baptism by fire ahead of it: “So far, no business case has been brought to us,” Urs Treuthardt conceded. A pilot project is intended to build awareness and generate demand. Key factors for success are therefore:

to identify the right questions that enable decision-making
to gather the necessary data to make the questions actionable
to correlate or integrate them using methodological expertise, and
to form interdisciplinary alliances in order to make the right decisions.

After that, it's a matter of deriving the "right" measures from this and taking action.

The discussion with the participants showed that such a process takes time, but also that it shouldn't be too granular: "Data doesn't have to be perfect. We just need to be able to work with it."

This also brought us full circle back to the opening talk: “Making a decision with a certain degree of uncertainty in a safe space is always better than not making a decision at all.”

FOOD FOR THE FUTURE AT TABLE TWELVE

At the end of the Friday session in Dornbirn, the participants were treated to a group lunch at Table Twelve, set up at a long table in another industrial hall: “It’s five to twelve” for our environment, the organizers said.

Together with farmers and restaurateurs from Vorarlberg, they aim to provide healthy, sustainable, and delicious "food for the future."

There are now Tisch Zwölf locations in three cities in Vorarlberg. For the DSTNCMP²⁴, a raw kohlrabi salad was served as an appetizer, followed by steamed pak choi with mashed potatoes and a herb frittata. To finish, a bright green cucumber-mint shot was served as a pick-me-up.

ART EXHIBITION IN AUGUST

All the results from the 32 sessions and impressions of the data:room as well as the wide range of activities are available in the WERKSCHAU²⁴ . It will be published in August 2024.

A summary will be published in October on Talk Tourism #4 in Munich.

IMPRESSIONS from the day
CC-BY netzvitamine GmbH/ Johannes Leistner